Furnishing a vacation rental is straightforward when you can walk through it. From another country it is a different undertaking: you cannot measure the room, you cannot meet the delivery, and you cannot see what arrived damaged until somebody with keys opens the box.
This office does that part. We inventory what the house already has, write what it still needs and why, buy and install it once you have agreed to the list, and photograph the house when it is finished — in that order, because photography is the last step and not one that runs alongside the others. Whatever is still missing on the day of the session is missing from the listing until the session is done again.
The furniture is yours and stays in the house. Nothing enters it that you have not approved.
Owners abroad usually expect the difficulty to be taste. It is almost never taste. It is that every step of furnishing a house needs somebody standing in it: to confirm a measurement before an order, to receive a delivery on a weekday morning, to refuse a piece that arrived scratched, and to notice that the wardrobe fits the wall but not the door it has to come through.
It also needs somebody who can say no on your behalf. A delivery accepted damaged is a delivery you own, and the argument about it is much harder to have from a different time zone three weeks later.
The same reasoning applies to everything else the house needs while you are not in it, which is a separate and continuing service: full-service management for luxury homes. This one ends the day the house is ready. That one begins the same day.
A vacation rental is not a furnished house with a lock on it. It is a house that has to work for a group of strangers for a week without anyone going out to buy something, and the list follows from that rather than from a catalogue — which is where an Airbnb setup service sold as a fixed package stops being useful.
What you want to find when you arrive belongs on the list too. The house is still yours, and the things you use should not have to be bought twice or kept in a storage unit between your own stays.
Salt air, humidity and direct sun shorten the life of fittings, textiles and finishes, and they reach what is outside before what is inside. Furniture for a coastal house is therefore chosen for its replacement rather than for its first summer, and a piece that cannot be sourced in the region is a room left incomplete for weeks once it breaks.
Timing matters for the same reason. Outdoor furniture is delivered, installed and photographed before the storm season rather than during it, and the dates are published: the Atlantic season opens on 1 June and the Eastern Pacific on 15 May, both closing on 30 November. A terrace furnished in July on the Pacific side is a terrace furnished inside the season, which means it may have to be cleared and stored within weeks of arriving.
Where the house stands changes the answer more than the budget does. Los Cabos and Cancún are two different climates with two different seasons on top of them, and each place we work in has its own window.
A real estate photography service works towards a sale: the house is shown once, to someone who will stand in it before signing anything. A house that is let is delivered dozens of times a year to people who have never seen it and who arrive holding the photographs. That is a different job with a different discipline, and the discipline is simply this: photograph what the guest will find.
So the house is photographed complete, with the furniture in place and nothing borrowed for the session, and no frame is stretched to make a room look larger than the one somebody will walk into. Luxury property photography has tricks for widening a room; none of them belong in a house that also has to be handed over.
The rest of the discipline is about what gets left out. Every space is photographed, including the ones that are not flattering — the parking, the stairs, the small second bathroom, the side of the terrace that faces a wall — because the space a guest was not shown is the space they complain about, and an omission reads as a promise once somebody is standing in front of it with a suitcase.
The furniture is bought in your name and stays with the house: it is an asset you own, not an inclusion in a fee. The work — the inventory, the list, the coordination of buying and installing, and the photography — is quoted in writing before it starts, against the house that has to be prepared. There is no figure on this page, because a figure that means anything is written against one property.
It is not charged inside the management fee. That fee is a percentage of income and is explained on vacation rental management; folding a one-time preparation into it would spread across twelve months a job that happens once. The four standing services sit side by side on the services overview.
Anything a guest asks for later — a chef, a transfer, a boat — is optional, quoted per use and charged when it is used. It is never part of this work and never part of the fee.
An inventory of what the house already has, a written list of what it still needs with the reason for each line, your approval, then buying and installing it in one working window. The house is photographed at the end, once it is complete.
Enough for the number of people who sleep there to live in the house for a week: beds and more than one set of linen, a kitchen sized for that number, a table everyone fits around at once, storage, and the outdoor pieces the guest actually came for. The exact list is written per house, because capacity and climate change it, and that is why no furniture package for an Airbnb fits two houses at once.
No. The measurements, the deliveries, the inspection on arrival and the installation are done by the office, and the decisions are yours in writing at the point where they matter, which is the list.
You do. It is bought in your name and stays with the house, including if you later stop letting it or change who manages it.
No. Photography for a sale shows a house once to a buyer who will visit it; vacation rental photography has to survive dozens of arrivals by people who never saw it, so nothing is borrowed for the session and no frame is widened.
No. Every stay is documented on departure, and those images exist to establish the condition of the house rather than to present it. Two archives, two purposes, opposite rules: one is made to be looked at before a booking, the other to be filed and opened only if something is disputed.
Outside the storm season, which opens on 15 May in the Eastern Pacific and 1 June in the Atlantic, and on the Caribbean coast outside the sargassum months as well. Interiors can be photographed in any month.
Tell us where the house is, what is already in it and how you use it yourself. We will answer in writing with what it would take to make it ready for guests, and in which month it should be photographed.